On 1 September 2013 23:18, Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/1/13, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> ** If you want to link against any other libraries.

Only if you want to do it statically, but you don't need to mess with
COFF for DLLs, most of these libs you've listed can build either
statically or as a DLL.

You mean dynamically loading DLL's, and finding/hooking up the symbols manually?

On 9/1/13, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> Most of who? The D devs? You all reject auto-complete and debuggers?
> How do you get any work done?

Well, we do get things done:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/dmd/commits/summary
http://www.ohloh.net/p/libphobos/commits/summary

I was joking.

On 9/1/13, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>    - Deprecate DMD makefiles. Seriously! Insist that contributors use the
>>> IDE bindings to work on DMD.
>>
>> Not gonna happen.
>>
>
> Reconsider.

How is deprecating makefiles easier than making whatever IDE that
you're using just call a 'make' command when you click a button? Even
VS comes with nmake and friends.

It's basically a hack though. It interferes with the dependency chain, and rebuild efficiency. Has some other weird side-effects too.
But even it it did to that, the experience that they would be confronted with is broken auto-completion, and debugging issues.
It's pretty shit that it stands to end-users to report bugs of this kind, when the devs working with this code every single day could catch loads/most of the common ones themselves just by working in the end-user environment for a while.

On 9/1/13, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Slowing us down won't help anyone.
>
> I'd argue that it would; inflicting the pain of trying to be a productive D
> user on the developers will certainly highlight the importance of the
> issue.

It would only make people leave the community, just like Tomasz
Stachowiak (h3r3tic) left, and now I've learned Michel Fortin is also
not using D anymore.

I think this argues my point for me...
This stuff should be top priority!

Anyway it's not like we're not aware of the issues, these things are
brought up in the newsgroups every other day. But the only way to fix
the situation is: file bugs, contribute with pull requests.

Or enforce that the devs actually experience the end-user experience. Then they'll know what the problems actually are, have a realistic perspective of their productivity impact, and might take them more seriously.
I think it would have a tendency to change the perceived priority.

On 9/1/13, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm really don't like bugzilla as an end-user, but I'm not performing
> searching actions.
> As a reporter, I find it's needless friction between me and reporting bugs,
> and I consequently report perhaps half as many bugs as I would otherwise,

See I don't understand this. You want everyone to work on the things
you're most interested in (IDEs), but you can't bother reporting bugs.

I'm just saying it how it is, or at least, how it was perceived in this instance by a room full of new D users, all professionals, mostly senior or lead programmers with some sway in their companies.
None of the others could be bothered creating yet-another-webpage-account to log bugs they encountered. I suggested they do so a few times. I was promptly ignored.
It's just that manually logging in to non-ajax websites is so last decade. People are growing very weary of creating and managing accounts on every website they visit.

I definitely feel this is a worthwhile weekend's experience to share. Take it or leave it.

> Are you saying I should have told everyone to set up their machines before
> coming?

Well look, you've obviously used D in a 64bit environment (so you've
had to set this up yourself at least once), so I don't understand how
you've managed to lose 6 hours on it. :)

Actually, previous times I've used it, it did 'just work'. This time it didn't. I was surprised (and a tad embarrassed).

About 6 hours was lost trying to work out what the problems were, then configuring it on everyones machines, then making sure everyone had Visual-D, link issues against the libs we were using, some issues with the particular version of the MS CRT that DMD seemed to really want to link and external libs wanting a different CRT (I couldn't find how to configure it for other CRT's), then Mono-D on the non-windows machines, then OSX issues; GDC was the first compiler that user found, Mono-D had problems, eventually gave up and switched to DMD... trying to convince people that it would be better in the long run ;)

It's definitely not a 1-click install and get to work.